[Heather]
We're "The Answer Gang"
We answer Linux questions, and crossover
stuff like this is cool too.

I'm using Windows XP Pro on my home workstation. Which 3rd party
applications would allow loading & "running" Redhat8 from RAM as a
virtual machine? If none which 3rd party applications might emulate
Redhat8? Are any shareware (freeware)?

[Heather]
RedHat 8 fits in RAM? Wow. I want your computer. It must be really
expensive. No wonder you can't afford more commercial software for it
I'll translate that as "need to run Linux without ruining my copy of
Windows", hope that's ok.

I'm studying network security and need to run or emulate Redhat8 on
XP (preferably without partitioning NTFS for dual boot) to pass the
tests.

[Heather]
Ok, that clarifies why you want to make sure it's Red Hat that you run.
The instructor wants it?

They don't have their own live-CD as far as I can tell, but somebody
put some extra effort into basing one off of a Red hat 7.3 distro -
perhaps that will be close enough. Or maybe the live flavor isn't
handy because RH just released 9, and haven't finished up a demo disk
yet. Who knows. Anyways, you can try this one:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/emergencycd2

If you really just need a Linux of some sort and your instructor was
thinking of RedHat because it's the only distro he knows, perhaps you'd
like one of the flavors which can install into your Windows disk space
without repartitioning. Look at http://old.lwn.net/Distributions
under the heading "DOS/Windows install".

Or, it can be noted that while RedHat really soaks up the disk space on
older hardware, is someone has a paperweight computer around, you could
boot it off of one of the many floppy based distros easily. Nearly all
Linux flavors have similar networking abilities, though only the fancier
ones will have cool stuff like samba support.

I hope the extra stuff below is helpful too, and makes your road to network
techieness a little more fun.

[Dan]
Vmware

But it'd be a lot cheaper, not to mention faster, to purchase a spare
hard drive and install Red Hat on it.

[Rick]
As Dan Wilder points out, you may have asked the wrong question.

[Heather]
While I agree with the guys that it seems like you may be looking for
the opposite answer, I'm gonna go out on a limb and answer the question
you actually posed. It's probably overkill, but heck, we specialize in
that around here
Mostly 'cuz the juiciest bits get pubbed in Linux
Gazette for the world to read. So forgive me if I shoot off on a few
tangents.

(and for some repeated info, as a few of these products can live in
Windows, carrying Linux on their shoulders, or the other way around.)

The company "VMware" makes a reasonably good virtual machine product.
I haven't kept track of whether they can run in winXP as the host yet
but it seems likely. 'Course they sell their host for Linux, as well,
and you would be able to host MSwin or many other OS' under that. It
may interfere with MS' nefarious plans for your computer a little, but
it's really great for rolling back the damage from any virii that come
after you. They do have a trial edition, at least, so I guess that
counts as shareware:
http://www.vmware.com

...Brief pause while I check whether winXP has joined their extensive
list of OS' that can be successfully hosted this way. My own experience
shows that win98 can be hosted just fine - but it runs a little slower
under this emulation, than the apps themselves do under WINE's direct
binary support for MSwin apps. Not that this is perfect mind you, but
it's gotten pretty damn good, and there's a handful of commercial vendors
helping give WINE a booster shot if you need that.
http://www.winehq.com and boatloads of useful links from Rick, below.

Oh yeah, VMWare's current Workstation product can host all that stuff:

Wow, they've got an SMP edition now too, that is, where the fake PC you
get is an SMP box. Scary.

[Halb]
It is not free ( costs about $300 ) but a 30 day fully working demo is availble.
It emulates a harddisk, networkcard, SVGA card, in short a whole PC.
But unlike BOCHS it does not emulate the CPU.

I doubt that you will be able to run VMware with a 2 Gig harddisk completely from ram,
but I doubt that you meant running the _complete OS from RAM anayway.

[Heather]
'Course if you were asking this from the point of view of a Macintosh
user I'd have to recommend VirtualPC. (warning: Connectix' website isn't
clean if you're not running javascript. Dratted bogus redirectors.
Grrrrrr.) Doesn't look like they do a Linux edition, but they have it
for Windows(tm) too:
http://www.connectix.com/products/vpc5w.html

[Jimmy]
They have a free trial. I've used it. It's quite nice.

[Heather]
At least last time I looked at it 'twas a bit better at hosting Linux than
SoftWindows, its competitor, was. Heh, back in our own issue 32 someone
asked The Answer Guy if there was a Linux port of it. Well, it looks
like Insignia went and sold that off to somebody else, so if someone out
there with a PowerMac wants RealPC look for the current vendor:
http://www.fwb.com/html/realpc.html

However, you wanted something free as in bucks. Or cheap anyway. I can
assure you these vendors have put some effort into the goodies, but let's
look at that.

Frankly, TUCOWS is a much better place to look for MSwin shareware than
the linux-questions-only folks:
http://www.tucows.com

Normally I'd leave you to your own homework there, but I'm curious if
anything new has cropped up that would let the MSwin-bound run Linux.
Unfortunately surfing their site has become more painful than it used
to be; I seem to recall being able to find small product blurbs, on
the order of the paragraph or two found at freshmeat for projects listed
there. Even one-liners would have been nice. I mourn the demise of more
pleasant interfaces like the "program manager" style icon map that
winfiles.com used to have before zdnet inhaled them. Hitting up Google
for the "windows virtual download" idea finds me an easier to use
shareware trove - maybe you'll find it handy. I didn't find more
virtual machines there, but I stopped looking after awhile. At least
this one's search widget looks in the descriptions as well as titles:
http://www.sofotex.com

Linux, of course, is free if you want to spend some time downloading it,
or pretty darn cheap if you choose the right place to buy your ISOs and
don't need a manual. So perhaps we can look at virtual-machine projects
under Linux.

For Linux under Linux, there's User Mode Linux, usually abbreviated to
UML. A few of the folk on the lnx-bbc project use it to test the builds.
Looking for it via Google! finds me both
http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net (hey cool! It's available as debian
packages
Even better, this page has a lot more content and organization
than most SourceForge hosted sites) and http://usermodelinux.org (a
PHP-nuke community board, looks like it's got lots of juicy links too).
Also, the white paper "Know Your Enemy: Learning with User-Mode Linux" at
http://project.honeynet.org/papers/uml might serve as a nice quick Howto
for getting it spun up and useful.

[Heather]
Maybe some of the free and opensource projects listed on Freshmeat will
work on MSwin environments too? Well, what the heck, can't hurt to
look. Both this and a search on TUCOWS for "virtual machine" are likely
to hit a few extra links for Java stuff, numerous other OS emulators,
and some bytecode-modelled programming environs. Oh well, comes with
the buzzword...

Wow. I didn't know there was a liveCD flavor of Linux for hosting UML
sessions - the ADIOS project. That's more like it:
http://dc.qut.edu.au/adios

While I'm tipping my hat to the Mac folk there's a virtual-machine for
running MacOS under Linux/PPC. Basically it seems to be a shim allowing
access back to the Mac hardware so you can run another OS ... even more
flavors of Linux/PPC, if you like:
http://www.maconlinux.org

The analogous project for the PC-compatible platform is currently named
Plex86, used to be called FreeMWare. Of course GNU's savannah project is
roughly similar to SourceForge, so if a project doesn't wanna make it easy
to find their FAQ or other docs, you'll have to thrash around on your own.
Anyways it looks like their win32 port isn't terribly useful yet:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/plex86

[Heather]
The folks there recommend "bochs" for emulating a 32-bit PC on non-PC
hardware. (I know, they haven't made Windows for non-PC hardware in
a coon's age. Oh well.) As far as I know bochs runs on PCs also, so
that might very well do the trick.
http://bochs.sourceforge.net

It seems likely that it would be much easier to set yourself up with a
runs-from-CD setup, if you want it in RAM simply 'cuz you don't want to
ruin a local hard disk while experimenting a little. Many Linux vendors
offer "live CD" editions of their stuff to whet your whistle. I can't
blame you for asking us, since my own quick glance around their website
doesn't seem to reveal Red Hat as one of them.

[Rick]
...how to preserve access to the few legacy proprietary Win32 applications...

[Jason]
It's interesting you should mention this, I was just thinking about legacy
applications for Linux the other day.

[Rick]
Once or twice, just to make sure it can be done, I dig out a source
tarball from the vanished world of 1992 Linux, and see if it can be
still made to compile and run. The answer is usually "You bet".
11 years of compatibility is pretty good, esecially given that the OS
was brand-new back then.

[Ben]
Interesting; seems we have a habit in common. I do that myself,
occasionally.

I've managed to compile - with either no or minimum tweaking - stuff
that K&R wrote way back (found it on the web page where one of them is
reminiscing about the Good Old Days.) It's been a few years, but I still
remember being pleasantly shocked.

[Rick]
Hey, cool! I'll have to install it, fire up teco, and UUCP you some
mail about it.

[Ben]
Pardon me, I'll just go to the corner and retch quietly...

(Great Ghu, what a sick idea. Worse yet, there's a "teco.el" for
Emacs... talk about coming full circle.)

[Heather]
I'm afraid I have to take full blame for that one. I asked RMS if the
original macros worked under the teco emulator for emacs. He was
suddenly just like a little kid -- he just had to know where he could
get it, was it free, would they enjoy joining the gnu project, would...

I had to slow him down enough to say that I'd heard of it so I just
wondered. I figured he probably had the originals around for old times'
sake. He later made sure it got into the standard emacs distro somehow.
And yes, he said... they do.

Now that is full circle. Or maybe full toroid. Hmm, donuts...

[Heather] Well, only almost full blame. I didn't write it, I just enabled it to
delight/torture/confuse an unsuspecting modern emacs audience.

[Jimmy]
I found the sources of the original teco (along with the sources of ITS
- Great Gnu indeed!) somewhere, but misplaced the link.

I personally think that making a teco with ANSI terminal support is
cheating, robbing you of that cutting-edge ASR33 experience. (I suppose
it would be arch to exclaim "curses!" at this point.)

Kids, these days! Spoiled rotten with their fancy gnome-teco
contraptions, I say. The terminal that's not terminal makes you
stronger.

[Jimmy]
The sources of
IBMs OS/360 are out there too - AFAICT in the public domain, because
they were published without a copyright notice before some law came into
effect.

[Rick]
USA copyright law was amended in 1978, to comply with treaty, removing the
prior requirement of copyright notices. Until that point, it was
possible to lose copyright through omitting notice. _Starting 1978,
covered works became subject to automatic copyrigh -- under proprietary
terms by default.

Typically, binary-only applications have almost the same longevity of
backwards compatibility, if you take care to furnish old support libs
(http://linuxmafia.com/wpfaq/downloadwp8.html#FIX, and both source and
binary interfaces have if anything standardised.

And this (along with adherence to public standards and documented
interfaces) is why we tell people that Linux can help them escape
the forced-upgrade treadmill.

[Jason]
If/When the next big open source OS
comes along (Supposing it isn't a UNIX. If it was, we'd just recompile
everything.), we really don't have to worry about supporting our old Linux
apps on it as long as it has a terminal emulator and an X11 implementation.
Then you could just set up a Linux PC specifically to run programs for other
computers on the network.

[Jimmy]
You probably wouldn't even need that - Next Big Thing OS would probably
have a Unix compatibility layer a la Cygwin written for it. There's
already a linux emulator for Cygwin (LINE -
http://line.sourceforge.net) and for SysV (LxRun -
http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~steven/lxrun) as well as the in-kernel
stuff that the BSDs have. And you can assume that Bochs and VNC will be
ported to this OS.

[JimD]
It's possible that the next major non-UNIX OS to
take a look at would be EROS. It has a vitally different security model
from that of UNIX - a true capabilities system, of which the "privs" in
the latest linux kernels are a mere shot in the right direction, and
where virtual spaces are part of the basic environment.
(http://www.eros-os.org)

[Jason]
I'm hoping, that as Microsoft's market share slips, they'll actually have to
make their OS compatible with other OSes. Windows 2000 uses Kerberos for
network security. Of course, they had to add their own extensions to it, but
still, when Microsoft is using a standard protocol, you know something is
up.

[Rick]
I'm actually more used to answering the reverse question of yours, that
of how to preserve access to the few legacy proprietary Win32
applications one might still need after upgrading to Linux.

Accordingly, my stock answer to _that question follows, and you may be
able to use some of its suggestions despite your
through-the-looking-glass perspective on the problem. E.g., you could
use the Win32 version of VMware, running RH9 within its virtual session.

%-%
-) VMware, Inc.'s VMware, http://www.vmware.com
(simulation in a virtual environment of a
particular theoretical x86 box's hardware, which then can boot various
OSes including Win9x/ME/NT/2k/XP within the emulated environment,
necessitating a copy of that OS, as well),

Thank you all for your answers to my question. I actually do
appreciate the time most of you took to give me alot of information. To
answer some of your questions: Yes I do have an expensive machine. I've
an 80GB HDD partitioned NTFS so, although I have the space, I'm not
going to repartition to install LINUX nor buy another HDD. I've 512MB of
RDRAM with 566MHZ FSB & a 2.27GHz P4. (Yes, I'm a hardware geek). I can
understand your pro LINUX position but frankly, hardening the security
of a server from the command line is difficult, but you can't beat free,
now can you?